Keeping your collection organized, documented and preserved enhances its value and accessibility for future generations. Today the most cost-effective solution to collection management comes through digital technology. Creating a digitized archive of your art collection serves as a low-cost and highly flexible collection management solution. From applying standard database packages to custom-designed museum management networks, we can help you select the solution most appropriate for your needs and provide the technical means to build and manage an effective system.

Clients have access to Curatorial Assistance's full complement of art services, as well as to our museum-trained staff and creative departments specializing in exhibit and graphic design, touring exhibitions, art projects, collections management, and photo-reprographic services that include high-quality digitizing of artworks, fine art printing, and conservation services.

Hans Burkhardt Collection

Untitled, 1940 (oil on canvas)

Hans Burkhardt (1904 – 1994) was a Modernist and Abstract Expressionist painter whose energetic, evocative, and emotionally-based paintings often anticipated the work of his contemporaries and reveal a diverse and exploratory career. Born in Basel, Switzerland, and emigrating to New York in 1924, Burkhardt became associated with Arshile Gorky, Willem De Kooning, and other members of the New York School before relocating to Los Angeles in 1937. While Burkhardt is most notable for powerful figurative works in Abstract Expressionism, and for his poignancy on the subject of human conflict, with works expressing the horror of war, over the course of his long career he was also involved in other art movements including California Light, Hard Edge, Minimalism, and Pop Art.

Curatorial Assistance manages the estate collection of Emil Otto Hoppé (1878 -1972), one of the most important art and documentary photographers of the modern era whose artistic success rivaled those of his peers, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Edward Steichen (1879-1973) and Walker Evans (1903-1975).

Curatorial Assistance handles the management and licensing of this rare collection. Highlights include several of Nijinsky’s original vintage costumes and accessories from the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky's personal artifacts, photographs, documents, and drawings, depictions of Nijinsky in various media, and paintings, photographs, drawings, lithographs, letters, documents, and posters given to Nijinsky by other artists and his peers. Another important aspect of this collection is a rare and unusually comprehensive record of Nijinsky and his fellow dancers from the 1911 to 1921 London Ballets Russes seasons with photographs by Emil Otto Hoppé. These intimate portraits represent a body of work that depicts Diaghilev's Ballets Russes dancers in their prime. The items in the collection tell the story of the revolution in dance, music, choreography, costume and stage design created by the Ballets Russes—the earliest moment in modern art history where innovation across these separate mediums was combined to create a sublime artistic experience.

PAUL OUTERBRIDGE ESTATE II

Carnival Carriage, Mexico, c. 1950

Curatorial Assistance manages the "Paul Outerbridge Estate II" that contains the artist's later color works made in California and Mexico from 1948 to 1955. This powerful and previously unknown body of work by one of America’s earliest masters of color photography demonstrates his breathtaking command of the new art of color photography predating the work of other modern masters such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz.

Management of the Outerbridge Collection includes the making of new print editions in exotic process including carbon-color printing and the management of image licensing and gallery sales.

THE BEARD/SANKOFA COLLECTION

Images copyright Derrick Beard

The Beard/Sankofa Collection is one of the most important assemblies of African-American art and cultural memorabilia from the 18th century to the present.

Comprised of both fine and decorative arts, including paintings, photographs, books, manuscripts, and other ephemera its unique advantage is the ability to assemble contextual displays of both rare and ordinary objects specific to the confluence of both the African and the American cultures at virtually any decade n the last 200 years.

In cataloging the collection Curatorial Assistance developed an ideological matrix of cross-linking criteria to enable the inter-relationship between media and genres of the same era to be viewed together as a continuous, united reaction to the ideological and historical events of that moment.

ERNST HAAS ESTATE COLLECTION

Route 66, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1969

For several years Curatorial Assistance managed the Estate Collection of Ernst Haas (1921–1986) Ernst Haas, one of the best-known, most prolific and most published photographers of the twentieth century. But although his colour work earned him fame around the world, in recent decades it has often been derided by critics and curators as "overly commercial", and too easily accessible - or in the language of curators, not sufficiently "serious". As a result, his reputation has suffered in comparison with a younger generation of colour photographers, notably Eggleston, Shore and Meyerowitz. To correct this misperception of Haas’ true artistic legacy Curatorial Assistance created a project with two of the worlds leading photo-curators, William Ewing and Phillip Prodger who reexamined Haas’s unpublished personal work to produce a stunning new book and exhibition, "Ernst Haas: Color Correction" (Steidl, 2011), that restored the Haas’ relevance in the contemporary art world along with his print sales and museum recognition.

ROBERT HEINECKEN COLLECTION

Raquel Welch (Time Magazine), 1969

Curatorial Assistance worked with Robert Heinecken to tour his exhibitions and to catalogue and place his important personal collection of Heinecken’s and his students work at the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art, Japan. Throughout his career, Robert Heinecken (1931–2006) amused, educated, and often shocked viewers with his pointed, irreverent photographic works. So provocative were Heinecken’s subjects—the Vietnam War, pornography, sexual politics, the media marketplace—that many critics and other observers rank either as avid fans or staunch detractors. Heinecken, as with his peers, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, practiced photography as a medium of conceptual art by incorporating photographs and other images into their art as a way to renegotiate the nature and meaning of contemporary art.

ROGER STEFFENS REGGAE COLLECTION

The Roger Steffens Collection consists of approximately 3000 rare and one-of-a-kind works, including vintage album covers and singles, posters, flyers, t-shirts photographs, postcards, magazines, books, buttons, and other memorabilia.

The collection, the world’s largest archive of reggae-related material and the result of almost forty years of collecting, presents the story of Jamaica’s cultural and musical evolution—meticulously chronicled through recorded music, historic interviews, and copious documentation of reggae events worldwide. Many of the musical recordings are one-of-a kind, many items are rare and autographed by the artists, and all materials are of museum quality.

Steffens’ effort to preserve the ethno-musicological heritage and to promote reggae to the masses has established him as a leading reggae authority and historian, an historic conduit to reggae, and a cultural chronicler. In 2001 highlights of the exhibition were displayed aboard the Queen Mary in Los Angeles.

GRAHAM NASH DAGUERREOTYPE COLLECTION

One of the most important photography collectors of our time, singer-songwriter Graham Nash, has spent the last decade collecting thousands of daguerreotypes. These unique and precious photographic works date from the middle of the nineteenth century and with mirror-like reflection seem to give us windows into the lives of others though this intimate process that makes unique objects. Curatorial Assistance has managed the cataloguing, proper housing, repro-photography and organization of these treasures in preparation for their forthcoming curation for public exhibition.